CHEATING CHAMPIONS

Accused Scrabble cheat to keep titles

By: Suryatapa Bhattacharya

The National ( UAE)

January 28. 2009

The Scrabble champion banned from international competitions for four years for cheating will not be stripped of his local and regional titles, it was announced yesterday. The Bahrain Scrabble League Committee believes the ban “is punishment enough”.

Mohammed Zafar, 19, beat Akshay Bhandarkar from Dubai last June to win the Gulf Scrabble championship. He is also the Bahrain national champion.

Mr Zafar, who denies cheating, was barred by the game’s governing body, the World English Language Scrabble Players Association (Wespa), for breaking the rule about how players draw their letters while playing in a tournament in Malaysia in December.

“The decision is not to strip Mohammed of his titles,” said Roy Kietzman, a member of the Bahrain Scrabble League Committee and a special panel of four that met on Monday night in Manama to discuss Wespa’s decision.

“We felt it was humiliation enough to be charged with being guilty and being banned from Scrabble.

“For him, this is public humiliation in the Scrabble community. We feel this is punishment enough.”

Mr Zafar was accused of taking his tiles from the top of the bag and having a quick peek at them before letting go of any he did not want during the Causeway Challenge, held in Johru Bahar in Malaysia.

The rules of the game state that although players may give the bag a vigorous shake, they must draw tiles at shoulder length while looking away from the bag.

Mr Zafar is also banned from the Malaysian tournament for life.

The Bahrain Scrabble League Committee says it “fully endorses the Wespa decision that he was guilty”.

Mr Kietzman confirmed that Allan Simmons, the chairman of the Wespa inquiry and Britain’s national champion, had been willing to lower the penalty and cut the time of the ban by half if Mr Zafar had admitted his guilt.

“We are urging Wespa to make strict guidelines on what to do in the future. This was a precedent.”

Last year, Mr Zafar faced the two-time defending champion of the regional Scrabble title, Mr Bhandarkar, in a thrilling match that saw the use of plurals, bingos [when a player uses all seven letters at once] and plenty of theatrics.

My Comment:

I followed the news about this cheating incident. Previous articles gave me the wrong impression that the player only had a peek into a lowered bag, which is common practice among many local cheats here. However, the explanation given by this article is quite clear:

"Mr Zafar was accused of taking his tiles from the top of the bag and having a quick peek at them before letting go of any he did not want."

This is one of the worst cheating methods, which was practised against me a few times in tournaments, and is being practised on a weekly basis by a couple of players at my scrabble club.

Cheating wise, it is a very effective method that would give the cheat a decisive advantage. If, for example, the cheat had their partial rack full of vowels, they could drop back every vowel they come across while replenishing their rack. It saves them the need to lose their turn in order to change some tiles. Even then, the change often proves disastrous.

This Zafar boy is particularly impertinent for being my namesake! He should shove his name back into the bag and pick another one, hopefully not a blank.